But the implication of electricity in the
sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made
to do--pursue leisure, earn a living--there are simply far more usable hours
now in which to do it

Living with electric lights makes it difficult to retrieve the experience of a
non-electrified society. For all but the very wealthy, who could afford
exorbitant arrays of expensive artificial lights, nightfall brought the works
of daytime to a definitive end. Activities that need good light--where sharp tools are
wielded or sharply defined boundaries maintained; purposeful activities
designed to achieve specific goals; in short, that which we call work--all this
subsided in the dim light of evening. Absent the press of work, people
typically took themselves safely to home and were left with time in the evening
for less urgent and more sensual matters: storytelling, sex, prayer, sleep,
dreaming.

John Staudenmaier, a historian of
technology and a Jesuit priest, for a recent conference at MIT. (The essay will
appear in a book called The Idea of Progress Revisited, edited by Leo
Marx and Bruce Mazlish.) Staudenmaier makes the point--obvious when brought up,
though we've mostly lost sight of it--that from the time of the hominid Lucy,
in Hadar, Ethiopia, to the time of Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey,
the onset of darkness sharply curtailed most kinds of activity for most of our
ancestors.